I Always Wanted to Be a Writer

Family folk-lore has it that I planted my hands on my hips and informed my aunt and grandmother that I was going to be a writer 'when I grow up'
when I was four years old. How they laughed...

They were forgetting the omen on the day I was born.

It was a boiling hot July day. My father had, nevertheless, built a fire 'that could have powered Accles and Pollacks' furnaces.'

A man came to the house to pay Dad for some electrical rewiring work he'd done for him. He paid in kind -- with a typewriter.

I would love to say that it was on this very typewriter that I typed out my first novel -- but no, that typewriter had long before been given away or sold.

I typed my first book on a very similar, cast-iron, weighty typewriter which my parents bought for my thirteenth birthday present, from a junk-shop. I think it cost them
£12.

Later, when
adults asked me -- as they were always asking me -- what I was going to be when I grew up, I used to say, 'A hairdresser.' I had an older cousin who was a hairdresser, and that was
considered a good answer, and shut them up.

I never wanted to be a
hairdresser.

From the age of about 7, when my Dad
gave meThe Jungle Books and The Just-So Stories, by Rudyard Kipling, I wanted to be
a writer.

But I came from a family of Black Country factory workers, none of whom -- at that time -- had ever gone to University, or ever written a
book.

I read a lot -- I read everything -- children's books, adult books, newspapers, comics, magazines, sauce bottles,
cornflake packets, adverts, graffitti my mother didn't want me to read... That's how you learn to write. At 14, I realised that, to be a writer, I only had to be good
enough. There were no college courses (at that time) to be passed, no exams to pass.

So, at 14, I started to read critically -- my own work, and that of others. How was this writer getting that
effect? Why did I find this writing laughable and unconvincing? Why had this story of mine failed?

If I could figure out the answers to these questions, I could improve.

At 15, and at 16, I entered the Children's Writing Competition, and won one of the three 'special' prizes in that age-group. This spurred me
on to write my first book, The Devil's Piper. Acting on advice from a judge in the competition -- the poet, Michael Baldwin -- I sent the book to the Literary
Agency, A M Heath, where it was taken on by Osyth Leeston.

She sent it to Faber, where the children's editor was Phyllis Hunt, who said that if I
could rewrite the book to a higher standard, Faber would publish it. I abandoned my education and rewrote it. Faber published it -- but because I was only 16, my father had to sign
the contract.

Since then I've written over 63 books, for all ages, from Nursery age to Young Adult -- and my YA books, such as The Sterkarm
Handshake, are read by many adults.

I won the Carnegie Medal, the most prestigious award a writer for young readers can win in the UK, for my book,
The Ghost Drum.

For my 'cross-over novel' The Sterkarm Handshake, I won the Guardian Fiction Prize. Both
these books are under film option as I write.